Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/297

 The history of the Church in England was continuous from the Mission of Augustine—or, if we prefer it, from the Synod of Whitby—to the time when Henry VIII., upon a disagreement with the Pope about his divorce, cast off his allegiance to the Papacy. From that time to the present, with the short interval between the reconciliation under Mary, and Elizabeth's first Parliament, it has been severed from and excommunicated by the great body of the Catholic Church: and as the latter was before precisely that which it has continued since, it is clear that the former must have been something not the same; and it is not the mere retention of a few names and titles, used in a kind of 'second intention,' and a few more or less maimed and amputated rites, which will ever make persons intelligently instructed believe that an establishment which obviously is the mere creature of a single State, is the legitimate and adequate representative of that imposing and magnificent Western Church, which is older than any existing State in Europe and grander than anything that the world has ever seen, and which has been picturesquely described by an old writer as 'the ghost of the old Roman Empire sitting robed and crowned upon the grave thereof.' A fair consideration of the actual facts of the Tudor history serves further to show that a theory like that which prevails so widely at present—which represents the English Church in any other light than that of one (though it may, perhaps, be admitted, the greatest and the most dignified) of the many Protestant Churches which arose in the sixteenth century—is a novelty which took its very earliest rise some half-century or more after the separation from Rome, as a direct consequence of Elizabeth's determination to give no quarter to the